Posted
by
samzenpus
on Thursday July 23, 2009 @11:07AM
from the dental-nightmare dept.

Scientists from the University of East Anglia are studying the potential health benefits of dark chocolate, and need 40 female volunteers who would like to eat chocolate every day for a year. The chocolate loving 40 must be post-menopausal and have type 2 diabetes so it can be determined if the flavonoid compounds in chocolate can reduce the risk of heart disease. Dr Peter Curtis, of the UEA's School of Medicine, said, "Our first volunteers are about to return for their final visit to see if the markers of heart health - such as blood pressure and cholesterol levels — have changed. A successful outcome could be the first step in developing new ways to improve the lives of people at increased risk of heart disease."

All that dark chocolate might help them crap out all sorts of unhealthier things they ate months prior to the test. Hopefully, they drink enough water so they don't become a diuretic diabetic in dire need of a medic.

Brilliant! I'm going to start calling it that. It sounds less offensive. In fact I'm going to go one step farther and just ask my Significant other how the department of transportation (DOT) is going. Basically, I'll just start using traffic metaphors.

Bisexual, attractive, nudist 19yo women who care more about her WoW character's latest adventure than shoes, that are looking to move into a basement, has a couple of friends of a similar nature that also need a place to stay, and hopes to trade their domestic skills in place of rent so they can afford the gigabit fiber drop, which they'd also share, but only if you agree to referee their jello-wrestling.

I've often wondered there... are you supposed to pretty much maintain your current lifestyle? What ifyou start working out like a fiend? What if you give up and binge on dounuts? I know the number of participants is supposed to smooth out that... but really, over a year isn't it likely that most participants have made at least one major change in their life?

I think the only way they could really make this work would be to have a much larger sample group balanced out with a control group of equal size willing to swear off chocolate for the duration of the experiment. There will definitely be huge changes in each woman's health over the year, and I don't think that 40 is a large enough sample to clear out the statistical noise, especially without a control group. So pretty much, this whole thing is just an extraordinary waste of time.

You don't get approval to do research on humans (even completely benign research) without a well designed experimental plan. If this research is IRB approved (since we're hearing about it, it probably already is), I guarantee you they have a control group, and have done the math to determine the minimum sample size needed to detect the predicted effect.

Unless you have read their research plan and can point out specific flaws in it, you're just talking out of your ass. Let me ask you, how big would you mak

First, a control group could take care of this relatively easily. Statistically, the people in the control group are just as likely to make those changes as the people actually eating the chocolate; though in this case a good, double blind study is impossible (it might be that eating a chocolate bar every day encourages the women to do other, seemingly unhealthy, things).

The other option is to use statistics to control for external variables. Assuming you know about the changes in behavior, you can contro

Just FYI: Flavonoids are polycyclic aromatic molecules, capable of absorbing free radicals through their conjugated bonds (i.e. moving the unpaired electron around so that a built-up of charge is not created (which drastically lowers its reactivity (and therefore stops a free radical's harmful effects (like the hydroxyl radical, which is used by fungi to invade the cell walls of wood (which is why flavonoids are being explored as wood preservatives, and why the Osage Orange tree is naturally resistant to fungi (since it has a natural abundance of flavonoids)))))). Flavonoids are good at absorbing the harmful affects of free radicals (unpaired electrons) in the body, and this can be a very good thing:)

Seriously guys, this is why scientists can't get dates. You have a requirement for female volunteers to come to your lab and eat chocolate...this may be the experiment that actually gets you a woman for once. Then, you screw it all up by requiring that the women be post-menopausal with type 2 diabetes, guaranteeing you're going to get a bunch of fat old chicks. Seriously guys, if you really want to have fun with this study, you need to require that the women be 18-25, physically fit, and sexually attracted to glasses and pocket protectors. You know, for science. Surely you could come up with some sort of sciency rationalizations to justify those requirements.

Just like drinking cofee and cigartte smoking, a steady portion of sugra will have just the same effects as smoking everyday for a year... will the study support the resulting eating disorders or rehabilitation at the end of the study?

Only in the US as far as I know... here in Europe, HFCS (better known as isoglucose here) is subject to a production quota (not illegal as many people seem to think, but definitely strongly regulated). The production quota is deliberately set at a very low level (just over 300000 tons per annum (which sounds a lot, but compared to the millions of tons of sugar we produce/consume, it's negligible)) so that using it as a sweetener in general would not be feasible for any mass-market product. For this reason

I'm an Insulin dependent Type 2 Diabetic... While I have the ability to match insulin with sugar intake, I agree with the parent comment,"I would never volunteer for this study". Asking a Diabetic to eat chocolate is just wrong! If I were able to maintain my glucose levels without insulin, I surely couldn't do it while eating candy.

Surely they aren't giving the subjects any chocolate containing massive amount of sugar. Also my guess is that there are a few doctors present as well.

Most studies on cocoa flavanoids have been done using 1 oz pieces of very dark chocolate, which are (relatively) low in calories due to the lack of adulterating sugar and cocoa butter. I assume they will be following a similar protocol to enable easy comparison of the results.

It depends on the % listed on the label. Your regulations may vary but I've seen mass produced "dark chocolate" sold with as little as 45% cocoa. So, of course, they fill it up with sugar and fat. It's still darker than standard milk chocolate but hardly the good stuff.

I'd say these trials would be done with chocolate that has at least 70% cocoa, which is around the limit you can get for supermarket brands, although Lindt does make an 85% version.

I used to eat the Hell out of chocolate, trying every new candy bar I saw, getting it as a present a lot, it just being plain available. In the last few years I'm not so interested, kind of worn out on it. I like a good piece of really, strikingly, of my god my glands are swelling dark chocolate, but I don't gobble it up the way I used to.

Really dark chocolate seems to have some interesting health effects. Really dark chocolates have more cocoa and much less sugar (example, my wife is Type 2 Diabetic, if she really wants chocolate, she gets at 70%+ cocoa chocolate bar) then your milk chocolate bars. Eating one like that every day as probably the same sugar risk as eating a couple pieces of toast.

If it is lower on the cocoa content, then yeah, I think that would be somewhat dangerous IMNSHO.

This is probably just an attempt to boost the market for dark chocolate. Some people who just read about this study before it's even conducted may be lead to assume that dark chocolate is a healthy alternative to a well-balanced diet and maybe exercise, or believe chocolate is somehow good for diabetes, or any number of other negative effects.

Worse, due to the desire to have a healthier lifestyle and the target audience being social, this false belief may get disseminated further.

It's unfortunate that the average person will not realize the difference between the real unprocessed/unsweetened dark chocolate being used for the study and the "dark chocolate" processed candy products you find at convenience stores.

Real dark chocolate tastes like ass, so basically all mass market dark chocolate products will add sugar and milk fat to enhance the flavor which will surely negate any sort of heart-friendly health benefits that this study is meant to find. Seems to me like it's going to y

It wouldn't be hard to make this double blind, you'd grind up chocolate and put it in capsules, and then grind up something inert, dye it brown, and put that in capsules. Don't tell the dispenser or the taker which group they're in. Of course the takers could open the capsules and try to guess which group they were in, but yeah, it's not impossible to do a good job double-blinding this, it's just not as interesting for the taker if they don't get to enjoy the chocolate.

The study actually uses extremely bitter cocoa powder, not sweet and tasty chocolate. The study is on the antioxidants in the cocoa powder. When sweetened, the antioxidants are destroyed. So, you have to choke down a nasty bitter powder every morning. Not something most people are willing to do.

Enough people are willing to eat a block of what is basically the same bitter powder with a bit of cocoa butter to keep it together that they sell it in most supermarkets, at least in Italy and Switzerland. Google for Lindt 99%.

40 people !you can't get statistics on anything from 40 peopleeither the summary is wrong, or the science is worthless

In particular, you could not possibly get anything about heart disease from 40 people unless you started with a population that had, say, a 50% risk of something over the 1 year of the studymath: say 50% risk of a cardiovascular event that requires hospitilization. That means, with the usual variability, that you would expect anywhere from say 20 -30 people to have an event.how much effect w

Dark chocolate is relatively low in sugars compared to other forms of chocolate. Many Type 2 diabetes patients can handle sugar, without insulin, in limited quantities. If there are health benefits from the dark chocolate, expending some of your limited sugar intake on dark chocolate may be worth it, particularly if one of the benefits is to mitigate other risks related to diabetes.

Oh come on, how many times do we need to do this study? No matter how much you test it, eating candy will never be good for you. Isn't there an old joke about research funding and the positive health effects of chocolate?

I'm not sure what exactly you have against a perfectly natural food. If we were arguing about saltine crackers or bagels with cream cheese or something I could understand it, but this not so much.

Really dark chocolate doesn't have all that many calories. It's not that fatty. It isn't loaded with sugar. (Have you ever had, say, 80% dark chocolate? It's quite bitter, very slightly dry, and 90% is even more so...) I'd personally expect that it would be somewhat difficult to get a comparable amount of calories of dark chocolate compared to any reasonable amount of steak. (Hershey's "dark" chocolate, which is loaded with sugar and fat, doesn't count, of course.)

Uh, yeah. Pure 100% chocolate is "only" 53% fat, 60% of which is saturated...:-/ That's about twice as much fat by weight as a "lean" cut of steak...

It's trivial to get a good comparison of nutrition; go to nutritiondata.com (or anywhere else - but this one seems to have the most data and the least ads), and search for "baking chocolate" which is of course 100% chocolate, and will be very close to premium dark chocolate in nutrition facts, if not necessarily in taste. (Although Ghirardelli's baking chocola

Pure 100% chocolate is "only" 53% fat, 60% of which is saturated...:-/ That's about twice as much fat by weight as a "lean" cut of steak.

Chocolate is basically cocoa powder (cacao with the fat removed) plus cocoa butter (the fat). Dark chocolate contains less of the cocoa butter; the darker it is, the less fat it contains. Again, I was under the impression that even saturated fat from plant sources is generally considered healthier than most animal fats.

Also, what's unnatural about saltine crackers and cream cheese?

White, bleached wheat with the germ removed; animal fat, sugar, salt with all the trace minerals removed, etc. Basically all the nutrition has been processed out and then they've added a sele

Keep in mind, that chocolates may have cocoa butter added, but very rarely do they have cocoa butter removed. What this means, is that baking chocolate is a lower bound for the amount of fat in dark chocolate. I have already shown that baking chocolate is very fatty, which implies that dark chocolate is, and I have nothing more to say here.

Yes, vegetable fats may be "healthier" overall (although I think the benefit is overstated), but the fact is, there is still an awful lot of them in chocolate; and a lot